EYFS Literacy Curriculum

At Ashcroft Infant and Nursery School, we recognise the fundamental role that good quality teaching of Literacy plays in a child being successful in the future. It is a key priority for us and our cross-curricular curriculum ensures that literacy is embedded across all subjects. To respond to the needs of our children and meet the requirements of the statutory curriculum, teachers are guided by a range of resources and materials, which ensure that they have strong subject knowledge. In turn, this enables children to make good progress in all aspects of literacy. The “In the moment planning” approach we use across the early years offers vast opportunities to provoke quality speaking and listening responses and our long and medium term plans provide a clear structure for skills progression.
At Ashcroft, we ensure that:
• literacy is taught within a broad and balanced curriculum and the children have regular opportunities to practise their skills in all aspects of our indoor and outdoor environments.
• Our literacy is predominantly text-based, and we choose high quality texts which appeal to the children in our school and link to the celebrations and world events that we are investigating at the time. We regularly discuss our text choices with the children and encourage the children to share their views.
• We aim to promote a love of learning through a language-rich environment which is positive and nurturing, valuing the children’s work and reflecting key, high-quality vocabulary.
• We also promote a love of reading through regular reading of carefully chosen class texts and a wide range of high-quality books for the children to choose from and book corners.
• We want children to participate in meaningful writing experiences, and we encourage children to be creative in their writing.
• We celebrate our children’s writing daily by displaying it throughout our learning environments.
• We recognise the key role that our partnership with parents plays to develop the language and literacy skills of our children. We develop this through weekly picture discussion, parent workshops, guidance in their reading record and through regular target setting. Parents are given regular information about what we are learning in class through Class Dojo, and an overview of our planning and texts are available online.

The use of a Drawing Club approach is one of our main literacy tools. In conjunction and where possible, reading and writing opportunities are linked to themes i.e. celebrations such as bonfire night, Diwali etc, ensuring that children’s learning is meaningful and they can make explicit links to real life experiences.

Multiskilled approach to literacy

As well as Drawing Club, we complete a short teacher-led input and writing activity, related to celebrations or topics of interest, i.e. Christmas. We also supplement these with a range of other texts, with the aim to develop children’s vocabulary and love of reading further.

Phonics/ reading Phonics is taught throughout each year group to enable children to develop skills in blending and segmenting, and to ensure that children meet the expected standard at the end of Year One. Systematic, carefully planned teaching and assessing of synthetic phonics, with a cycle of assessment and review is in place as each phase of phonics is taught. Our children are taught to decode print through daily phonics lessons following the Little Wandle, Letters and Sounds scheme.
We recognise that children learn to read at different rates and this is reflected in the flexible teaching strategies and resources used at the different stages of a child’s learning. For example, individual reading and whole-class reading approaches are used across the school. Books matched to the Little Wandle Phonics scheme form our main reading material. We also provide each child with a variety of texts they can enjoy at home. These are carefully selected books matched to their current level of phonic knowledge, to ensure that children are appropriately challenged in both word reading and comprehension.

The Learning Environment

Our classroom environments reflect the fact that we value books and texts of all kinds. We promote Literacy as a tool for learning, and aim to develop children’s pleasure in reading, writing and a love of books.
Our environments have:
• A well-organised and welcoming book corner, containing a wide range of high quality fiction and non-fiction books, big books, and poetry.
• Displays include non-fiction books related to the current themes being explored, cross curricular dis-plays which celebrate and promote good quality communication, including clear labels that question, inform and provide a vocabulary resource.
• Other age-appropriate areas in the classroom, e.g. story CDs, story bags, writing tables, phonics zone and role play/small world areas

Further resources of fiction and non-fiction guided reading packs, big books, poetry, plays, fairy tales, multicultural stories and story CDs are kept centrally within our school library.

Pictures from the weekly Drawing Club story are put on writing frames and plain paper is available throughout the continuous provision in our classrooms for children to develop their ideas further. Developing children’s vocabulary is pivotal to their success as learners and, therefore, we have a clear bank of vocabulary used daily to ensure that language is introduced and rehearsed at appropriate intervals to minimise a vocabulary gap, ensuring that our children develop word breadth.

Through role-play/ small world, children are provided with opportunities to imitate and innovate stories, basing their ideas on texts that have been shared in class. This enables them to build a bank of vocabulary, which can later be incorporated into their writing. We explicitly teach the skills needed for writing as outlined in the statutory curriculum, and children apply and consolidate these in purposeful writing activities i.e. small signs, class lists, Drawing Club pictures.

Drawing Club

Drawing Club is the brainchild of author and childhood advocate, Greg Bottrill. He developed Drawing Club as a creative process, which engages children and has a way of bringing stories to life. It offers a creative path for children to see themselves as capable and confident storytellers. Imagination, passion and excitement for reimagining, reading, drawing and writing is at the heart of Drawing Club.

This simple approach enables us to adapt to the needs of our cohort, as within every interaction we are able to meet the child at their level of understanding and enabling them to develop in their own unique way. Following the planning suggestions for this approach, we introduce either a traditional tale, story or cartoon each week. Sessions are about making conversation as a group, listening, talking confidently, offering ideas, collaborating, respecting and using new vocabulary. New vocabulary and an action linked to the story are introduced in a contextual way during a short teacher-led session. This is then reinforced by all staff during interactions throughout the week. The first two sessions of the week are spent looking at the characters and the setting of the stories; the later part of the week is used as independent imagination time. We have developed it into a sequential approach that works symbiotically with our phonics, handwriting and storytelling sessions throughout the year.

In the Autumn term, drawing is the hook, and we are building up children’s fine motor and creative drawing skills. Children are supported in using their phonics knowledge to write a simple CVC code word on their picture. During the spring term, children are encouraged to progress their code words further and use their phonic knowledge to write a short caption, i.e. the cow. Language from our handwriting scheme is modelled by the teacher during this term to reinforce correct letter formation. The summer term brings the expectation that children will begin to write a simple sentence for their code word, i.e. the cow is happy.